


What You Come Back To

by Ololon



Category: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-09-04
Updated: 2011-09-04
Packaged: 2017-10-23 10:26:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,123
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/249272
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ololon/pseuds/Ololon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is set some time after What You Leave Behind, but with many recollections of earlier events. Garak has been kidnapped by Cardassians who have some past reason to hate him (yep, I lack all semblance of plot, but fortunately he has no shortage of enemies) and is recuperating in the care of Dr Bashir, who rescued him. However, as a result of the what he suffered, his memory and awareness are completely confused. Whilst Garak is trying to recover his sense of what is real, and Julian’s watching him, they separately recall their past on/off relationship, and the poetry that Julian kept foisting on Garak every time he loved him and left him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	What You Come Back To

**Author's Note:**

> Pairing: G/B  
> Spoilers: Up to the series end, but nothing spoilery is mentioned in explicit detail.  
> Disclaimers: I don’t own them, nor did I write quite a few of the words in this piece!  
> Notes: I’ve quoted rather too much poetry in this piece – I promise I have a reason for it other than mere pretension! All quotes are in italics. You don’t have to have read the poetry to understand it’s meaning in the story. Footnotes felt too disruptive to include, so I will list the source of quotations at the end of the story.
> 
> This was originally posted on the Garak/Bashir mailing list in May 2005. This version is the first publicly available version, and is updated (but not substantially).

**  
What You Come Back To   
**

**  
  
**

_I am accustomed to consider literature a search for knowledge…faced with [the] precarious existence of tribal life, the shaman responded by ridding his body of weight and flying to another world, another level of perception, where he could find the strength to change the face of reality._

 _(Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the next millennium, trans. William Weaver)._   
__

**  
  
**

**Prologue**

 I remember the chill that went through me, not from head to toe, but seemingly straight into every bone, all at once, when the news I had been dreading had finally come through.

  
_….Paradise is eternally present and so is hell. Time blurs them, crowds them in so close together that salvation and damnation are one. Memory is like being outside time. It can separate them…_

I remember throwing things into a suitcase like a scene from a cliched film, all the time my mind racing faster than my hands could keep up, and my heart faster than either.

  _…Memory shows us what heaven is like, where nothing ever happens. It shows us that moment when desire achieves its end, and stays touching, holding the thing it loves, forever…._

I remember the shuttle ride that felt like it lasted forever, unable to sit still, unable to quite believe the sudden violence of my own decision, the caged frustration of my hopes and fears in that endless long slow descent into hell.

  _…Memory enslaves us, preserving the horror, bending us to it, moulding us to it. Memory is purgatory…_

I remember that desperate search. Rubbing everyone up the wrong way like the awkward youth I once was. And I remember finding him. To this day I will remember finding him, first, before all other things. Out of order in the memories of my oh-so-ordered mind.

… _To be saved or damned you have to be outside time. You have to step out of this life…_

He wouldn’t remember it like that. He _doesn’t_ remember it like that, and probably never could. For Cardassians, you see, do not remember the way that Humans do, and he never satisfactorily explained exactly _how_ …

 - He would tell this story differently.

 

 **Chapter 1**

 **  
**

_But I remain’d, whose hopes were dim, whose life, whose thoughts were little worth, to wander on a darken’d earth, where all things round me breathed of him._ The low sun is streaming through the windows; dust sparkles and dances in its beams. For a moment I cannot place myself. Am I in the cave, when the sunset would briefly grace the rocks? Am I in the desert outside Bamarren? But no, the light is too wan for that time, that ruddy time of hot-blooded youth. I am back here, in the ashes of the land. I wish I could be happy for my life, my home, but I am not. Is there any point? So much is gone…Cardassia is full of gaping holes where beauty and greatness should be. I am aware, dimly, of shapes and shadows around me, somehow not quite there yet not quite disappearing, but I cannot bring myself to strive to bring them into focus. I am weary. I should fight these clouds in my mind, but I let myself drift away again. I dread coming back to this hollow world.

*           *           *

He lies, still shadowed, cocooned in this enveloping darkness. I had opened the window to let in some light, some air; feeling, as though through him, the unbearable closeness of the room. And I couldn’t bear to have the lights on any longer. But it is getting cold, and soon I will have to close it again. There is no climate control in this place. I think, for about the sixtieth time, whether he would be better off back in my infirmary. Would that pristine Starfleet luxury support him, or suffocate him further? Would he hear, through those four walls, the echoes of his people’s architecture, deep at its core? Would that speak of home, or merely the place that was his prison for all those years? Would he sense, even a little, something of me there? I wonder, sometimes, if he even knows that I am still here.

Such brown musings come upon me more and more in my long vigil now, in the twilight hours, when that rust red light, that stains the harsh planes of his face like sunlight on mountains, deepens its shadows, sharpens its ridges, then finally ebbs away altogether. I fear he does not know where he is at all. But he recognises me, and he speaks to me, sometimes.

“You were right, Doctor,” he whispered, from a ravaged throat, that first night, “There is hope for my people yet.”

“Why?” I asked, in genuine bewilderment, wondering what straw of hope he had found at this, the worst of times. And he had smiled, though his eyes had closed and he could not see me.

“They are not so defeated that they forsake even revenge,” he had said. Trust him to come up with something pessimistic. I’m not even sure I don’t agree with him.

*           *           *

 _The mind is its own place, and in itself, can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n_. I have an oft-recalled memory of late (or perhaps it is a dream); a forgotten cave, heavy rock above, below, at my back. I am hung, suspended, amidst all this rock, and I am staring up, at a darker blackness than that which surrounds me; I am staring because somewhere, wavering up there, is a tiny spark of light. I think it is a star, and I am looking at it, because it is making me hopeful of something, or someone…When I look ahead again he is there: my dark angel; and I am carried out to that starry heaven from whence his marred perfection descended to this sordid earth. I said something, I think; I cannot bring it back. He said something, but the words are gone. So much is gone, and what is left is left still hanging, suspended by nothing and to nothing; I cannot connect it. Where does this memory fit in? And what of my dark angel?

*           *           *

What misdirected revenge! They struck at Elim Garak the interrogator, Elim Garak the Obsidian Order operative that was, for half-remembered past crimes. Son of Tain. They forget Elim Garak who liberated Cardassia from the Dominion. _I_ didn’t.

“Why you?” I had raged, storming the room, heedless that he was probably oblivious to my ravings. “There must be a thousand others who have done worse!”

“Yes, thousands of the reformed. It’s amazing how the tyrant repents his ways – when his life depends on it,” dryly, in both senses of the word, and I had rushed to find him more water, like a nursemaid.

“You’re hardly a tyrant,” I muttered, glad nonetheless. This was the most he’d spoken since I’d found him, and the most coherent.

“I agree. I intend to lodge a complaint with Captain Sisko, if he ever returns. He should have left us Dukat. After all, when Dukat was alive, nobody noticed _me._ ” I didn’t laugh, but I had to shake my head and smile. And use the excuse to pat his hand and fuss over his sheets again. He would have none of it.

“When are you planning on going again?” he rasps instead.

“I’m not going,” I say, as firmly as I can, and it’s clear he doesn’t believe me. “Garak?” I ask, but he has shut his eyes. He speaks in a voice like glowing embers.

“ _The human dress is forged iron; The human form, a fiery forge; The human face, a furnace sealed; The human heart, its hungry gorge.”_ I deserve it.

*           *           *

Angel? Incubus, more like, another human fancy – oh I have words a-plenty but none my own! Have they all come from him to whom I spoke them? He is the key. He is the dark thread that runs through all these scattered thoughts….why can I only remember him?

I remember the unfamiliar press of cool lips.

“Well, there’s a human saying, Elim,” he tells me, nervous, “Actions speak louder than words.” He is still holding me, shaking, and rests a trembling hand against my chest. “Watching you lying there, thinking I had no way to help you…I so nearly lost you…I so nearly lost you,” he murmurs. He gives me a question in a kiss? Then I shall give him an answer in a kiss, and I do.

No sooner than he is here then he is gone again, the slow artificial dawn half-convincing me it was but a phantom. No explanation, no return except – he has left me a book in his place – more human words. Am I to find an answer here, from this Byron’s lips?

 *           *           *

Cardassians, Garak insists, lack the linear aspect of episodic memory that, he asserts, so imprisons humans. Perhaps I am finally becoming like him. Certainly all my thoughts go in circles, all my recollection, all my reason.

“They should have allied with Satan,” Garak opines, and I cannot help but laugh. “I’m perfectly serious, Doctor! Without that ‘wily fiend’, those dullards would never have thought to eat the apple and free themselves from the tyranny of God’s autocracy – and there’s humanity, stuck stupid and ignorant for all eternity…hmm, actually…” and he gives me a speculative look. I glower, or try to through my grin and cheesecake mouthful. “What a tragedy!” he declares, melodramatically waving his fork around, “Satan, the romantic rebel, the freedom fighter! – foiled at the last – _and_ he was the best character! I confess, interesting as the premise was, the last book was just more than I could take of that insufferable fool Adam and dreary, witless Eve. Not to mention the self-righteous angel.” I laugh some more. Actually, I half agree with him, but I’m not going to let him know that.

“Trust you to like Satan the best!” He quirks a brow ridge.

“Naturally, and don’t pretend you don’t.”

“Well, at least you say you found the idea behind it of some interest.”

“Oh, quite fascinating, actually. Only humans could originate an idea whereupon ignorance is innocence and the power of knowledge is sin – moreover, not only sin, but the original birth of so-called evil in the world. Intriguing.”

“I must admit, my modern perspective finds that rather odd myself, but it held sway over human society for hundreds of years. It was all part of the way organised religious institutions maintained their power.”

“You mean by lying? Dear me, how disgraceful.” I open my mouth to protest but he charges on, “In any case, I can’t help feeling that God really should have known better; everybody knows that it’s the fruit that’s forbidden that tastes the sweetest,” and he pauses here, fixing me with a look that makes me hot from head to foot, then carries on as though he hasn’t noticed, “Apart from vacuous Eve, who needed it spelled out to her, of course. If she weren’t so obviously not his equal, she could have forsaken Adam and pledged herself to Satan instead.”

“Fallen angels,” he murmurs, later, when I tell him about the conference I shall be going on. We part, and he smiles brightly. “ _So he took his wings and fled: then the morn blush’d rosy red: I dried my tears and arm’d my fears, with ten thousand spears and shields.”_ I am so mortified that it is more than months later that I remember who first wrote those words.

*           *           *

I have dozed off, and when I wake, he is looking at me again, with a detached curiosity.

“What is it?” I ask.

“You are still here,” he observes.

“Of course I’m here,” I hasten to reassure him, leaning forward to clasp his hand where it lies loosely on the covers. His eyes travel sluggishly to follow the movement, then back to myself.

“I rather expected you to vanish once more.” I’m not sure what to make of that. He is looking at my hand on his again.

“Nonsense!” my false heartiness annoys me sometimes. Blame what they teach you at Starfleet Medical. I try to convey my sincerity, my conviction. He’s very confused, despite his apparent lucidity. He needs to ground himself back in this place, this time, this reality. “I’m real,” I say, as earnestly as possible, “I’m not going anywhere Garak, that’s the truth. I’m real, and I’m staying.”

“Ah, but _are_ you real? How am I to know?” It’s too much. I lean forward and press my face urgently to his, a desperate kiss.

“Feel this!” I urge him in a whisper, breaking away only to look in his eyes. I kiss him again. “ _This_ is real, Garak, this is me!”

“Ah, but is it true?” he asks, his gaze meeting mine. And I have to turn away.

Every time, every time I…succumbed, all he gave me were words. The words of my _own_ species, more oft than not, thrown back at me. Those times, they flood back to me now, one after the other. _The repetitive epic is the most elegant form in Cardassian literature_ , he had once said to me. So there I was, flinging myself into his arms, where I was welcomed, leaving before the dawn, flinging myself at someone else, where I was rejected, consuming myself in doubt, then, finally, flinging myself into his arms again, where I was welcomed; home. An endlessly repeating cycle, variations on the theme. Always, he simply let me go, and I tried to voice what I felt, but I just couldn’t. So I left him with poetry instead, never quite finding what I wanted to express, never quite heartless enough to leave him nothing at all. And he loves words so much, I thought, in my delusion, that they could substitute. Maybe he appreciated the irony.

*           *           *

 _Is not the past all shadow?…The mind can make Substance, and people planets of its own with beings brighter than have been, and give a breath to forms which can outlive all flesh._ I feel his hands press against my chest; they pull my heartbeat up.

“I thought I’d lost you, I thought I’d lost you,” he repeats it over and over again, now that he has found me. “Thank god it wasn’t real.” He draws a shuddering breath. “I didn’t know if anything was real anymore, after that. I had to be sure…that you were.” He lifts his dark-bright eyes to mine; his hands travel up with his gaze, to my shoulders, then down again, taking my sleeves with them.

And when the shadows fade and morning comes again? At least, such a morning as there is in a place like this, suspended far from any sun. The false light shows me another book in his stead: Tennyson.

“He’s a little too dead for my tastes,” I remark when next we meet for lunch, but he refuses the bait, and, once more, it is as though it never were. He leaves me with only words, but none of them are his own.

*           *           *

He’s so fragile, now, so wounded, that it reminds me inexorably of that time when he was undergoing withdrawal after the cranial implant’s removal. I was scared then, although I didn’t admit it to myself, but it’s nothing like what I feel now. How could I not drop everything to leap to his rescue? I cannot shift the stain of that place from my mind; the ancient, worn cave. And him, just hanging there like a sacrifice, staring fixedly overhead as if he thought the roof would fall in. I fear that maybe he did, although he was quite calm – but that was probably the drugs. His head dropped, and a small stab of blue glittered in my direction from under swollen eyelids. And what did he say when he saw me, finally?

“You forgot your white charger.” Thanks, Garak. I nearly wept just to hear those knowing tones, mocking words. There was still something of him left. I’m just not sure how much.

*           *           *

“Well, I found it rather frustrating,” he said, taking a sip of kanaar, and considering a moment. “The Songs of Innocence and Experience, whilst possessed of a certain simplistic elegance in their style, were just a little too simplistic for my tastes,and the prophecies, a little too overcomplicated in their amalgamation and reinterpretation of a variety of human myths and religious elements, not to mention the multiplicity of roles that his characters play.”

“You didn’t like them then.” I sound quite forlorn to myself. I was _sure_ he’d like it. He surprises me with a dazzling smile.

“On the contrary, dear doctor, I _adored_ them! I found them quite fascinating. Perhaps I should have found them easier to interpret with a more thorough grounding in your people’s history and religious tenets, however.”

“Oh, I don’t know. Generations of human scholars have argued over their interpretation. It seems to me that Blake’s motive in weaving such elaborately drawn works is to create sufficient layers of meaning that every reading can draw out something different, and that you never completely understand it.”

“Of that I approve,” he observes, then, on an afterthought, “I must say, your Western cultures do seem to have an obsession with linking sex and sin, life and death, prophecy and dream, don’t they?” As we rise to leave, he gives me a curious look and paraphrases, but not from Blake, “ _Perhaps Heav’n is for me too high, to know what passes there; I will dream not of other Worlds, what Creatures there, live in what state, condition or degree, contented that thus farr hath been reveal’d, not of Earth onely but of highest Heav’n_.”

*           *           *

Watching myself then it sometimes feels like it’s someone else, or some other time entirely, something not just past but so old it was long ago consigned to history. But then, it also feels just like me, the same as always, Julian Bashir. Then, though… then he talked, all the time. Even if it was a load of…codswallop. Now, he is mostly silent. Sometimes he just stares. Sometimes he seems somewhere else entirely. Sometimes when he wakes he says something, and sometimes it’s to me. He hasn’t spoken a word of Kardasi, and I while away the endless hours trying to fathom if this means something, and inevitably succumbing to the tempting hope that it’s because he knows it is I that is here. I wish I could help him. Really help him. Not this useless waiting. I dread what he sees when he shuts his eyes.

“ _Dreams in their development have breath, and tears, and tortures, and the touch of joy_ ,” Garak quotes me. How clearly he reads me now, and I….I can only read him by thinking like him. Those blue eyes, half-open, are turned for a drug-hazed look at me, before he turns away again to look out the window, and closes his eyes. A faint smile graces his features. He always looks out of the window, at the sky.

*           *           *

 _What words are these have fall’n from me? Can calm despair and wild unrest, be tenants of a single breast, or sorrow such a changeling be?_

“I thought I’d be angry with you,” he confesses, “And I was, at first, when I heard about how you just…just allied yourself with him again like nothing ever happened. But then I remembered how scared I was when I thought you’d been blown up by that bomb, how worried I was when you left and I didn’t know if I’d see you again…I couldn’t stand to lose you.” A shuddering kiss. Perhaps I should refuse him, for I know he’ll only leave again. He seems to have to feel that I am lost to him to realise how much he really needs me. He has to feel that fear. Yet how can I refuse him? For it is the same fear that drives him away come morning, after he has risked his fragile heart once more – he thinks he cannot keep me. I could explain, but only time will make him truly understand. Humans need a linear progression, an advance from a beginning to a middle to an end (though where they think they go from there, I have not the faintest notion). He doesn’t understand this endless circle, and in not understanding, he traps himself in it. And me. He has pulled away a little, anxious at my lack of response. So I smile and pull him back to me, to keep him whilst I can.

When I wake again, there is no sign of him, only the familiar sight of a small, bound volume left upon the bed. _Paradise Lost_ , the title says. Well, quite – it has just walked out the door.

 *           *           *

“Julian, when are you going to do something about this?” Ezri had asked, standing in the corridor, hand on hip, blue eyes frank and knowing. Good question. I wonder she tolerated it as long as she did. Some part of me – some part of me become a little paranoid with age, I suppose – questioned whether she had known about this all along. Jadzia might have, at least.

He sleeps a while; restful sleep I think, I hope, but I cannot bring myself to do the same. Instead I read in the ruddy sunset afterglow. I have my own room, and he doesn’t truly need me here all the time, but I can’t stand it. Every room I go into in Cardassia feels like an attic. Dusty, old-smelling, half-lit with a strange light; red and golden, warm colours, made wan and watery, full of worthless secrets and faded memories of people who will not return…

I turn to find his eyes upon me once more, and suddenly it is too much.

“Why did you do it? Why didn’t you try to stop me?” I ask him, on a choked breath half-kept from sobbing, “Why did you just let me walk away, why did you let me go, every time?”

“Don’t you know?” I shake my head. He actually reaches and strokes my hair, absently. I can feel my heart hammering in sudden hope.

“I knew…in order for you to come back, I had to let you go.” And that, is the truth.

“Why didn’t you _say_ something?” I demand, unfairly.

“What could I say, that would not drive you further away?” he retorts, reasonably, “And what should I say, when it was you who owed the explanation?” I cannot answer that, but Garak does, and it smites my heart.

 _“Take wings of fancy, and ascend, and in a moment set thy face, where all the starry heavens of space, are sharpen’d to a needle’s end_.” I cannot. This time, I cannot, and I mean to tell him – but his sense has fled again.

*           *           *

“I gave up and read a biography instead. His life was far more interesting than his poetry.”

“Garak! Didn’t you like _any_ of it?”

“There’s only so much stomach-churning so-called romantic poetry I can tolerate, Doctor. Moreover, I just cannot sympathise with his emphasis on individual freedom over the rights of the state, a human viewpoint if ever there was one.” I give him a piteous look. I _like_ Byron, dammit!

“I knew I should have given you his satire Don Juan instead,” I mutter, stabbing moodily at my dinner.

“Then why didn’t you?” mildly. Because that wasn’t what I was trying to say, I think. “It’s very long,” I say, evasively. I feel I have somehow betrayed him, and so it makes me lie.   

“I liked _The Dream_ ,” he remarked, in an apparent and somewhat surprising effort to salvage things, “It’s an unusual view of dreams and their overlap with reality. Certainly, I seem to be experiencing something of the sort myself lately.” His gaze is more thoughtful than accusing. I wince, but he is thinking of something else. _“Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’, gleams that untravell’d world, whose margin fades, for ever and for ever when I move.”_ Where did he get that? I don’t know it, but it sounds so familiar…

*           *           *

 _Which way shall I flie, infinite wrauth, and infinite despaire? Which way I flie is Hell; my self am Hell; And in the lowest deep a lower deep, still threatening to devour me opens wide, to which the Hell I suffer seems a Heav’n._ Was it the first time? Was it the last time? Ah, I am become human in my habit, to order my memories according to the whimsical fancy of time! And yet, I can sense that there is a purpose in this drive for direction. I can feel things fitting into place. I am _aiming_ at something. It was the only time, because it was different. He chose to break the cycle. He broke all the rules.

“I didn’t know…I’m so sorry,” he tells me, showing up when I least expected him. When I most needed him, instead of the other way around. “I never could understand why you kept running after him, but I do now.” Almost, then, I refused him. I thought it pity, but I think, now, it was not. And then? “Thank you,” he had said, as he drifted towards me, an unsure dance. He does not know if I will welcome him. “Thank you, for showing me,” and he is sincere. I cannot remember what I said to him, but it was not the right thing. I remember only the sultry heat and darkness, bright eyes; he is all summer warmth beneath, arching against me, and I, pale wintry ghost above, slow rocking in him. I did not understand then, only despaired when he slipped my embrace once more having re-awakened those treacherous fires. But now I do.

He hands me another book whilst we’re pretending nothing happened at lunch again. At least he remembered the book, even if it wasn’t when he left. This time it is William Blake.

“More poetry doctor?”

“You may find it interesting. Most of them come with illustrations which are an integral part of the story.” Pictures, is it? I think that I am not the one who needs a picture book to figure it out.

*           *           *

I have to ask, while he is with me still. I dare to hope; he wakes more frequently. He seems more lucid. Still I have to ask.

“Do you think I’m true? Do you think I’m real?”

“My dear Julian, what humans call truth and what they call reality are two very different things. As for the former, that I have always known. As for the latter? That remains to be seen.” And there it is, that smile, just for me. His eyes are flickering; he murmurs so I barely hear it, before dreams claim him again. “ _For Mercy has a human heart, Pity a human face, And Love the human form divine, And Peace the human dress_ ”. I am daring to hope.

*           *           *

“Actually,” he confesses thoughtfully, “In some ways, I rather liked Tennyson. The man certainly had a talent for expressing utter misery in a pretty manner.” I hadn’t quite expected this.

“Well,” I declare at last, “There’s our discussion sunk without trace, if we find ourselves in agreement.” A mischievous grin, but the haunted look is still there, and I feel a steady guilt rising up in me. I know he can’t possibly have liked Tennyson. Not really. He would have thought him self-absorbed and hopelessly idealistic. He looks at me. I somehow know I am not going to understand what he is about to say next.

“ _Sibyls of the future: they have power – the tyranny of pleasure and of pain; they make us what we were not – what they will, and shake us with the vision that’s gone by, the dread of vanished shadows_ –” And I didn’t understand. Or rather, I pretended I didn’t.

*           *           *

 _Thou measurest not the time to me, nor yet the space that I do see. My mind is not with thy light arrayed. Thy terrors shall not make me afraid_. All Cardassia is a pale wintry ghost now, shadow of her former self. And yet…I was a fool to think that I could change and she would not, that I could stay the same, and she would do likewise. What you hold onto always slips away from you, and what you come back to…is not what you left behind.

My dark angel is sitting in a chair, half-asleep. Naturally he is here. He nearly lost me, after all. Unthinkable that this alien should sit in this landscape, only a short while ago, but much has changed. I am strangely content. With those uncanny senses, he wakes and is at my side in one fluid move, face taut with anxiety.

“I thought I had lost you,” I tell him. He just shakes his head, says nothing, but I know he understands. I know his fears. Tears streak his cheeks and he kisses mine, again and again, and I see in his face that he is turning a thousand words over and over in his mind and finding every one wanting. I am gratified. At length I speak; maybe I have it right this time. “ _Ah dear, but come thou back to me: Whatever change the years have wrought, I find not yet one lonely thought, that cries against my wish for thee_.” And that smile, is only for me.

 

 **\- End -**

 **Source of quotations:**

In the order that they appear in the story, the quotations are:

Geoff Ryman: The Child Garden (split sections in the Prologue)

Tennyson: In Memoriam, AHH

Milton: Paradise Lost

Blake: A Divine Image, Songs of Experience

Blake: The Angel, Songs of Experience

Byron: The Dream

Milton: Paradise Lost

Byron: The Dream

Tennyson: In Memoriam

Tennyson: In Memoriam

Tennyson: Ulysses

Milton: Paradise Lost

Blake: The Divine Image, Songs of Innocence

Byron: The Dream

Blake: With Happiness Stretched

Tennyson: In Memoriam. 

(Readers may notice that the order of books that Garak quotes from in his past lunchtime discussions with Julian _appear_ to be in reverse order, chronologically, to the order in which they were given to him. You will also notice that no time reference is given for the lunchtime discussions themselves though, so this is impossible to verify. In this way I attempted to show that the linear aspect of time in Garak’s memories versus Julian’s was not strictly adhered to, although his recollections of their liasons do follow series chronology, and thus enable Garak to reorder himself back into the present, or at least, save me from my own confusion).


End file.
